Medical Blockbuster Book Of The Year: The Patient Will See You Now

Dr. Eric Topol wrote what I believe will be the medical book of 2015 -- The Patient Will See You Now: The Future of Medicine is in Your Hands. Dr. Topol is a leading thinker in healthcare’s age of enlightenment. He does a terrific job of laying out the immense potential of smartphones and iMedicine technologies to democratize medicine like never before. In the book he likens the smartphone’s potential to become the “Gutenberg Press” of medicine. Topol's writing style makes it very accessible for the lay person without any “dumbing down” that would be a turnoff to health professionals. This is a must read for anyone that cares about healthcare.

Dr. Topol mixes in the promise of emerging technologies and approaches with a sobering assessment of where the present healthcare system isn’t reaching its full potential. The book is very well sourced so one can easily find data that backs his assertions. Leonard Kish called patient engagement the "blockbuster drug of the century". Topol goes into great deal about how patient engagement will manifest itself in the coming years. The following are some choice quotes from the book that give you a small taste of what you are in for when you read Topol’s book:

An ECG was emailed to me by a patient with the subject line “I’m in atrial fib, now what do I do?”, I knew the world had changed.

We’ve never seen such a discrete challenge to the medical profession, but we’ve not had the platform or landscape for that to be accomplished. Until now.

Increasing frustration and vexing aspects of health care today may influence a bottoms up movement, propelled by smartphones and social networks for improving the future of medicine

Health care consumers are truly the Rodney Dangerfields of medicine: “I don’t get no respect.”

Three Labradors and two Portuguese water dogs made the diagnosis of lung cancer with 99% accuracy! Similarly, dogs were able to detect prostate cancer via urine samples with 98% accuracy. At the University of Pennsylvania, there is a Working Dog Center with Dutch and German shepherds have shown 90% accuracy in detection of ovarian cancer.

Labs (the dog variety) made the diagnosis of lung cancer with 99% accuracy

Just as the first home pregnancy test of 1978 heralded a new era of consumer empowerment back then, these new products and companies are the precursor to an upcoming, unbridled capability of across-the-board lab testing anytime, anywhere.

Is there any other walk of life when services are purchased but the purchaser doesn’t take ownership?

Purchasing healthcare is like blindfolding shoppers in the hope that they can & will then shop smartly

For blood pressure, a review of 52 prospective, randomized studies showed that people who took self-measurements had better blood pressure management versus those whose only monitoring came through usual care (e.g. at the doctor’s office).

52 studies showed that people who took self-measurements had better blood pressure mgmt vs. usual care (e.g. at the MDs office)

2 out of 3 doctors won’t email with their patients, which has been proven in multiple studies to markedly improve efficiency of practice

There are 440,000 lethal, preventable events each year from care in hospitals, or roughly 1/6 of all deaths that occur in the US each year

The majority of hospital CEOs think a hospital-building bubble has popped, with marked over-capacity---at least 40-50% excess of beds left in its wake. The result of this trend will be that the hospital room of the future will be the bedroom.

Hospitals as they exist today are set up to fail. Their fiscal future is beyond bleak; their paradoxical harm instead of heal potential cannot be dismissed or substantively diminished.

Just as the printing press was the great object around which modern culture has orbited, the smartphone and iMedicine are forcing a comparable transformation.

When a reformation and a renaissance of medicine can take hold. Only then can we move from an era in which Desmore asserted, “medicine is not a science, [but] empiricism founded on a network of blunders” to a new medicine as a real data science with each individual capable of calling the shots, making the choices.

I can't think of a book that does a better job of projecting how the future of medicine will unfold and the critical role individuals will play in their own health (beyond the obvious).

[Disclosure: Dr. Topol is also the Editor-in-Chief of Medscape which is owned by the company that I'm employed by -- WebMD. However, my knowledge of Dr. Topol pre-dates when WebMD acquired my company last year. This review reflects my personal opinion and not that of my employer and doesn't relate to my role with WebMD.]

Dr. Eric Topol examining Stephen Colbert's ear on his show

Chase was named one of the most influential people in Digital Health due to his entrepreneurial success & writing along with luminaries such as Eric Topol, Patrick Soon-Shiong, & Vinod Khosla. He speaks to & consults with new ventures inside of established compan...